Heptabase good ideas

After much hesitation as to where this post belong, I stumbled yesterday over heptabase (https://heptabase.com/) video and medium article explaining the vision around that tool. It has a lot in common with Obsidian (markdown local files, bidirectional links), but also has the concept of “infinite canvas” where notes can be spacially arranged and moved, as well as visually linked by captionned directional arrows. Each note can be added (or not) to any or several of those infinite canvas who will only have to remember the spacial corrdinate of the note (who remains an independant document).

The concept of those canvas looks pretty much like a graph view except that when you zoom in you see (and can edit) the content of the notes, see only the notes you added yourself and in the disposition you decided by yourself. If you allow for drawing lines or stuff in the background this basically let user define his own “meaning” for each canvas : one could bring notes and link then to make a gantt shart, or to put notes on a drawn timeline, another canvas could for example have several columns and notes places into those column be used as a kanban… Basically enables the user with a lot of personal workflows and dashboarding that would otherwise need to be implemented with plugins and custom syntax.

Is is also pretty othogonal to what we have now in Obsidian, those canvases/dashboard could totally be a new and optional addition to people who want to present their notes in a different way than just the graph, also making the graph view more “useful” and organized, as i see many request in that direction.

I know lots of things get tagged as “plugin request” but it seems such a core functionality in need of many of the core system if it is to allow notes to be viewed as rendered and editable inside the dashboard that either the api must evolve to cover edition and rendering or it would have to duplicate a lot of the stuff that the current kanban plugin would also need in order to become full fledged.

I think the tools present at least a few good idea that seemed like an evidence when i saw them in action and can see some very good usecase i could make with them. Video presentation : Heptabase onboarding - YouTube

12 Likes

Thanks for sharing this! I really like the visual way you can lay out and connect your notes in Heptabase.

I’ve found two ways of doing something similar (but not the same) in Obsidian:

In the Kanban plugin, you can create cards that transclude other pages (e.g. “![[MyOtherPage]]”) and then arrange them in columns.

In the Excalidraw plugin, you can create sticky-notes that contain the contents of another page (again, using “![[MyOtherPage]]” as the text of the note), and then resize them, connect them via lines, and so forth.

Neither of these options are as slick as what Heptabase does, but they’re pretty useful nonetheless. I agree that it would be great to see Obsidian provide a way to arrange notes into boards like this.

Thanks again for sharing your idea!

7 Likes

Just to understand well Obsidian vs Heptabase, if we take the example of Card in Heptabase = Note in Osbidian, and Whiteboard in Heptabase = Canva in Obsidian, what Heptabase do that Obsidian do not?
What is your view about that? Thanks.